Story of a Man last time a man was sealed in skin like an inspoken word sealed in it was mid-spring, most people arm in arm, most trees whispering and he could just make out the fluttering light...
Old men can be buggers at hanging on. Hamish Henderson, who died last March at the age of 82, hung on firmly through three books, edited by others: his writings on ‘Song, Folk and...
Nicola Barker usually stages her plots in suburbs or on islands. Behindlings is set on Canvey, a suburban island. The protagonist, Wesley, is either the leader or the target of what may or may...
Fishing at the Falls Beer is cold in the water A breeze is cold behind us, A draught from shadow, where it Is cavelike, the wall eaten under, A moody huddling, where rock Has fallen from the...
The new volume of poems by my Harvard colleague Jorie Graham, in its US edition, bears on its jacket a detail from Vermeer’s The Astronomer, showing the hand of the astronomer as it...
About fifty or sixty years ago, at the end of a century or more of unenthusiasm, Measure for Measure came into its own. A largely moral or metaphysical explanation of its quality helped it to...
Almost five years ago the Cape Town publishing company David Philip brought out Way Up Way Out, a novel by Harold Strachan. Some time later I was sent a copy of the book by a friend of...
The Tree House Hands on a low limb, I braced, swung my feet loose, hoisted higher, heard the town clock toll, a car breenge home from a club as I stooped inside. Here, I was unseeable. A bletted...
John Banville’s heroes seem to be in search of a centre or subject for their ruminations. Ghosts pester them; voices ring in their ears. Something vital has gone wrong and they must take...
The first answer is Beckett’s in another context – to ‘Mr Beckett they say that you are English?’ he answered ‘au contraire’ – he didn’t say...
During the half-century since 1950, Lindsay Duguid writes in an essay in this collection, ‘the lady novelist turned into the woman writer,’ the historical novel became respectable...
Samuel Richardson’s account of a servant girl’s defence of her virtue against the advances of her lascivious master (‘Mr B’), given in her own letters, made what we now...
Between 1951 and 1954, Wolfgang Koeppen published three scathing, disillusioned novels ridiculing the notion of a new start and a clean slate for West Germany. At the time, perhaps as many as 80...
Sort of eight o’clockish, at a guess, we’re low on petrol, as estimated, and we’re near Kokstad, as calculated, and it is now time to pull in here at the police station, as...
Walk Out to Winter Are we dead, do you think? I thought we were when I visited your art school annexe and saw your things all over the floor. Someone had nailed a dress to a board and thrown a...
For Alice and Marjorie Klee Wyck Laughing One they call Through soaked air on Vancouver Island Where she snores adenoidally in roadmakers’ toolsheds Inches down night-chilled slimy rungs To...
None for forty years, then two in 14 months. Not London buses, but English translations – in this instance, of books by the Swedish novelist Hjalmar Söderberg (1869-1941). The Serious...
Humphrey Carpenter is a practised biographer; he can do groups as well as single persons, but he admits that this group set him a new problem, which was that he remained throughout unsure whether...